


Cryptids, Hauntings, and Other Folklore

by tuesday



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Forest AU, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 00:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17033264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: In which Venom is a forest and Eddie Brock still falls in love.—Travelogue stories were not in Eddie Brock's wheelhouse, and this was why.  All he wanted was to get some time away from the city and get some time to himself.  Maybe enjoy his time as a single man now capable of dropping everything without consulting anyone but his boss first—and his boss had sent him here, said, "Look, Eddie.  You need a break.  Take one.  It'll be like a vacation, but it's mandatory.  Who knows?  Maybe you'll get a story out of it."Now Eddie was stuck down a ravine with a broken ankle.  His backpack had flown off into the underbrush.  His arms and palms were scraped up, he was bruised his whole body over, and there were twigs in his hair where he'd hit an evergreen on the way down.  His head hurt.  His vision was blurred.  The sun was on its way down.  No one knew exactly where Eddie was except "investigating cryptids, hauntings, and other folklore and legends of modern day America."





	Cryptids, Hauntings, and Other Folklore

**Author's Note:**

> If you have any concerns, please see the content warnings at the end notes.
> 
> The Forest AU idea originated with the incomparable Strozzzi (whose own Forest AU fic is great and I would recommend checking out!) and the Symbrock Squad Discord, without whom this would not exist.

Travelogue stories were not in Eddie Brock's wheelhouse, and this was why. All he wanted was to get some time away from the city and get some time to himself. Maybe enjoy his time as a single man now capable of dropping everything without consulting anyone but his boss first—and his boss had sent him here, said, "Look, Eddie. You need a break. Take one. It'll be like a vacation, but it's mandatory. Who knows? Maybe you'll get a story out of it."

Now Eddie was stuck down a ravine with a broken ankle. His backpack had flown off into the underbrush. His arms and palms were scraped up, he was bruised his whole body over, and there were twigs in his hair where he'd hit an evergreen on the way down. His head hurt. His vision was blurred. The sun was on its way down. No one knew exactly where Eddie was except "investigating cryptids, hauntings, and other folklore and legends of modern day America."

They said this forest was haunted. Eddie shivered and put his back to a tree trunk. He wondered if he was going to become just one more figure to add to its story, another ghost to haunt the imaginations of hikers and locals alike. He knew he should get up, find his backpack with its thermal blanket and supplies.

Eddie closed his eyes. He was in pain. It couldn't hurt to take a breather first.

—

Eddie woke up dazed, a little disoriented. It wasn't every day he woke up at the bottom of a ravine smeared with dirt and aching like he'd taken a beating and been left in a dumpster as a lesson on when to back off. (It had been especially rewarding to take that particular dirt-bag down.) Eddie was a city boy—it was a rare event he was in a forest in the first place.

All the same, he was pretty sure this wasn't how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to wake up cold and concerned about exposure. He was supposed to wake up with the monumental task of finding his backpack in the dark with only his phone as a flashlight to guide him. He was supposed to spend the next several minutes fumbling around for a stick to use as a makeshift crutch and cursing at himself for failing to stick to the path and falling down what felt like half a mountain in his hubris. Instead, he was comfortable, somehow. He had a blanket of loose leaves over him, weighed down by a carpet of moss. He felt more under him, protecting him from the leaching cold of the ground and the sharp rock he'd sat on hours before and couldn't be bothered to move from. His foot was resting, elevated, on an odd set of roots that had grown to somehow resemble a footrest.

It was still dark, and his nose was cold where it peeked out from his strange, makeshift blanket, but these were not the dire straits Eddie was expecting. He should probably get up, investigate. His camera was in his backpack, but he could record on his phone. Either there were strangely helpful campers who'd then left him to slumber in peace or this was indicative that there was more to this whole haunted forest thing than Eddie had initially thought.

But Eddie was warm. The moss was soft. The scent of green growing things surrounded him like freshly laundered sheets. Eddie closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

—

When Eddie woke again, it was dark only because he had a bunch of trees crowding around him to block out the sun and the wind. He stared up at the canopy of branches and leaves acting as the ceiling to his little forest hut.

"That's, uh, that's different." Eddie wondered how he was going to get out. He sat up and some of the branches moved. That was not the wind. "Hello?"

One of the branches waved at him.

Well. Either Eddie had hit his head a lot harder than he'd thought or something seriously strange was going on here. He started to push himself upright, but when he hissed at the pain of putting weight on his left foot, the branches reached down to push him flat again.

"Um." Eddie felt his head for obvious bumps, but while his scalp felt a little tender in places, he couldn't find any obvious major injury. If he had a brain bleed, he'd probably already be dead, right? He'd spent the night down here, after all. All the same—"I think I need a hospital."

Twigs like fingers brushed at his hair like they wanted to inspect him, too. Something dark and sticky that was _nothing like sap_  oozed out of the bark to lick at his skin. It felt like it was reaching under and into him. It felt like there was something vast and incomprehensible that had slid the barest part of itself inside and was examining the way Eddie worked, looking for injuries, but also peering into his thoughts. Then the sticky substance and the twigs withdrew, and Eddie felt oddly empty inside.

What—?

Without quite meaning to, Eddie found himself chasing after it, hands grasping the twigs, fingers sliding against rough bark. The black substance was gone. "What?"

There was a voice like leaves rustling in the wind, a quiet, but firm susurrus which stated, "No brain bleed."

"Right," Eddie said faintly.

When he shifted, the branches pushed him down again. "Stay."

It should have been creepy, a voice made up of a hundred different little nature sounds combining into one word that meant more, that implied they weren't letting him go. Curled up in moss and curious about what was going on, Eddie was finding it hard to strike up any feelings of mortal terror. Whatever this thing was—a wood spirit, a ghost, a forest that had somehow gained sentience—it had gathered him up and tucked him into a bed it had made for his comfort. For whatever reason, it cared, had decided to take care of him.

"I'm going to need food and water at some point," Eddie said, but he was already leaning back. The moss drew itself back over his body where it had slid down. "I have granola bars in my backpack."

Eddie spent the next several minutes trying and failing to mentally draft an intro to this story that no one would ever believe and would probably never see the light of day. There were the distant sounds of wood creaking. A bird cried in the distance. There was the quiet churr of woodland insects, unbothered by the unnatural movements of the roots of the trees. One dirt-covered length slid between two tree trunks and dragged his backpack with it. It was unzipped, its contents spilling haphazardly over the sides.

"Thank you," Eddie said carefully as it deposited the mostly empty backpack in his lap.

A branch reached out and patted him on the head.

At least a few smashed granola bars had survived the trip.

—

A while later, nourished, rested, and with a pressing need, Eddie sat up again. Some vines that had at some point slid up and wrapped themselves into his moss and leaf blanket—or maybe they were there the whole time, holding it together—slithered out and tried to push at his shoulders, but he brushed them aside. They tugged rather more insistently, and he directed an unimpressed stare at the tree that had patted him on the head earlier.

"I appreciate the help, but I am not going to piss myself for you." Eddie levered himself up and off the bed, pushing the clinging moss blanket firmly off and away. "It's way too early into the relationship for that level of kink."

A branch reached out again, its twigs like fingers covered in that strange, sticky black substance that was not sap. Eddie was prepared for it this time. When the black flowed out of it and into his temple, he leaned into it. That slightly empty space filled, immediate and warm, with a feeling like curiosity. Instead of looking for language and a potential brain bleed, it felt like it was rifling through everything Eddie knew about biology, plus everything he'd ever forgotten or been taught and had go over his head. It moved on to the more mundane, to the moments of Eddie's everyday life. There were countless memories of drinking and eating, followed by memories of eliminating. There were memories of throwing up and the one time he'd been in the hospital and hooked up to an IV. There were memories of sweat, cursorily examined, and memories of tears first flinched from, then gone over in full.

Eddie found himself reaching back. He was an old oak stretching high toward the sun and patiently soaking its rays. He was old growth mulching and munching old leaves and the bones of older bones. He was a black puddle flowing into the forest and taking what it provided, survival and a different sort of food. He was a broken body stumbling away from a crash site—

There was a feeling like being pushed gently away, of _not for you_.

When the black substance withdrew, Eddie felt as empty as the last time, but he was more easily distracted this time by his bladder, fuller and more urgent than ever. As if in consolation, the branch touching him shifted, transformed. The black pushed out from it, flowed around it, and when it drew back, the branch was shaped almost like a crutch. It gave a sudden crack partway down its length and crashed to his feet.

"Thank you?" Eddie hesitantly reached down for his new walking stick only for roots and vines to helpfully push it up and into his hands.

"Welcome," the forest whispered back.

Eddie stumbled out of the little hut the forest had provided, then a little further still. There was no point in trying to find privacy. Eddie was uncomfortably aware of the presence that surrounded him with every step taken and root twitching out from underfoot, with every press of his feet to the ground only for grass to spring up like a red carpet in the process of being laid out for him.

"That's a bit creepy."

One wouldn't think there would be a way for rustling leaves to sound malicious or amused, but both were definitely present as the forest repeated, "Welcome."

Eddie took care of business against some kind of bush and tried really, really hard not to think about how his urine disappeared like it was immediately absorbed. Instead, he set himself to retrieving his scattered equipment. He found his actual blanket and a rolled pair of socks. Halfway up a tree, caught in the branches, his canteen was hanging by its strap. The tree passed it down to him. Eddie looked up the slope of the ravine, but there was no way he was tackling that today. Leaving aside the concern that if he left, this strange alternate universe he'd landed in where cryptids were real and happy to help him out would be gone, it wasn't physically possible for Eddie to climb out—and that was if the forest would even let him leave.

Eddie was trapped, but he had food, water, and the potential opportunity for the interview of a lifetime. Not a bad way to start a vacation, sprained ankle aside.

—

Actually getting that interview was a little more difficult. He powered on his phone, ignoring the low battery, and set it to record, but all the playback gave was Eddie's voice and rustling leaves. What Eddie clearly heard as words when they were spoken was a clear-cut case of apophenia when just the voice recording was taken into account. Then, of course, there was the case of the subject, who was less interested in answering questions than in convincing Eddie to sit down and rest a while.

Eddie squinted suspiciously at his phone, then the old stump like a throne the forest insisted he sit upon. "How _do_  I know this isn't just some elaborate hallucination?" He was seriously considering tackling the hill after all. "All I have is your reassurance, and you might not even be real."

Vines grew over the tree stump and curved around Eddie's legs. Black oozed from the surface, and when it pulled back, the vines had fossilized to the consistency of hardwood. "Stay, stay."

Eddie was not amused. "That's not cute. Cut it out."

More vines wrapped around his torso. They crept up his arms, his neck. "Stay."

Eddie wasn't proud of what happened next. To be blunt, he panicked and hurt himself. When the vines withdrew, it wasn't because he'd overpowered them or showed he wasn't to be messed with. It was because in his thrashing he'd started to strangle himself, a vine around his neck also looped around his arm, pulled so hard he was sure there was a deep red line across his throat. Even with the vines around his body flopping down to disappear into the underbrush like fearful snakes fleeing to safety, even with the ones around his legs flaking and crumbling to the ground liked they'd aged further yet and were turning to dust, Eddie was trembling and afraid. He was suddenly and irrevocably aware of how small he was, how human. Every breath rasped in his throat. He couldn't—he felt like he still couldn't breathe.

Except for the stump, every bit of growth drew back from him. In five feet in every direction, there was a perfect circle of dirt.

Eventually, Eddie wiped at his face. He looked up at the trees standing sentinel in the clearing around him. As stern as he could manage, Eddie rasped, "Never do that again."

Solemn, the forest agreed, "Never."

But to Eddie, it still sounded like, "Stay."

—

To be perfectly honest, that incident put a bit of a damper on things, but when Eddie grabbed his backpack and tried climbing the slope after all, nothing stopped him. Nothing helped him, either. It was a halfhearted exercise in making a point and discovering that oh, yes, his ankle liked that about as much as expected, which was to say: not at all. It gave out on him maybe a third of the way up.

Only a tree reaching down and plucking him up by the backpack he was strapped into kept him from a repeat of his earlier trip straight to the bottom of the ravine. The tree gently, carefully put him back down at the same spot on the slope where he'd started to slide. It then withdrew to its original position several feet away. Despite the distance, Eddie could tell it was hovering.

Eddie sighed. "Fine. You can take me back down."

The tree crept closer and when Eddie stayed steady, unflinching, it leaned down and gathered him up. A wide branch snaked under his thighs; smaller ones gently braced his back and chest. Eddie held on as it lumbered slowly downhill and deposited him in front of the tree hut and his stump throne.

Eddie patted a branch before collapsing on the stump. "Don't think I don't know you could've just as easily carried me up."

The forest didn't answer him. Eddie had the sense it was sulking, but it said, "Ask."

Eddie smiled. "When I'm ready."

The tree stationed itself close by—much closer than before.

Eddie leaned into it, the bark rough against his cheek. "It's okay to be lonely."

Twigs like fingers reached hesitantly down to brush against his temple. "Lonely."

"Yeah." Eddie closed his eyes. "I get lonely, too."

Eddie embraced the opportunity to take a break, breathing in the scents of pine and loam and growing things. He listened to the wind rustling the leaves of the forest canopy, no words to be found, and the chirr and chirp of insects. His ankle throbbed, but he enjoyed the sensation of having his hair stroked. He'd almost forgotten how nice that felt. The air was clear. The day was warm. He wasn't alone, but it wasn't as scary as before. The forest was lonely and, in its own way, scared. It didn't want him to leave, but it wasn't going to stop him. Eddie could see why people said the forest was haunted, understood entirely the idea that it contained some sort of genius loci or other inhuman intelligence—but it wasn't cruel. It just really seemed to want a friend.

"Hey. What should I call you?" Did the forest even have a name besides what humans had given it?

Just when Eddie had resigned himself to the forest not answering him, it said, "Venom. I am Venom."

"Venom, huh?" Eddie smoothed a thumb along the rough bark of the tree's trunk. "Nice to meet you. I'm Eddie Brock."

—

Eventually, Eddie levered himself upright and returned to the bower. At some point, Venom had found and collected all of the items first scattered down the hillside and then which Venom had dropped out of the backpack when dragging it back from where it had landed to Eddie in one of Venom's first bids to convince Eddie to stay—after, well, collecting his bruised body off the ground and tucking him into a bed Venom had hand-crafted. In retrospect, even pre-verbal, Venom had not been subtle.

In a pile on Eddie's bed—reformed to be sturdier along its base, but now heaped high with soft, spongy moss and leaves as some combination of mattress and bed clothes—were a wide assortment of objects. Once clean underwear now streaked with dirt. Several more granola bars in even worse condition than the ones that had managed to stay in Eddie's bag. A little camp cooking pot and several MREs to go in it which Eddie had known instinctively on buying he did not actually want to try. A whole bag of granola. Hygiene products. A length of ripped canvas that had looked easy enough to turn into a bivouac when Eddie had watched it being assembled on YouTube, but which had probably been just extra weight at the time he had packed it, much less now, when the forest itself had gone out of its way to build him a cozy little shelter.

There were also things Eddie had not packed, like an old, rusted flashlight and a dented metal lighter. From Eddie's possessions to the detritus of his fellow hikers, Venom had gathered them up and presented them as either a quiet apology or a bizarre rite of friendship. Eddie's heart felt full looking at it all.

"Thanks," Eddie said softly.

He hobbled over to the bed and sat down on its edge. It was surprisingly comfortable. He packed each object carefully away again, leaving out only that which didn't actually belong to him. Those, he propped up on a little side table that had appeared as Eddie sorted through it all. It looked neither like a deranged stump nor like some poor, tangled and misshapen tree. Venom was improving at this whole furniture thing. Eddie propped his backpack, now zipped safely closed, against the foot of the bed. He stretched out on its surface.

"So. What do you do for fun around here?"

A branch reached out, down from the canopy. Eddie's hand met it partway. When the black substance slid over, spreading across his hand and disappearing into it, it felt familiar, comfortable. It didn't feel like anything shifted to accommodate Venom, but rather that Venom was sliding in to occupy a space long reserved.

The memories when they came this time were shared willingly, paraded out like a slideshow of Eddie's grandparents' vacations: a timelapse shot from the inside of an oak growing from germination to standing tall. A snapshot of leaves unfurling to greet the sun. Sliding into a squirrel huddled in the tree's hollow and fixing its rasping breathing only to slide back out again and watch it skitter anxiously away. Curling through the tree, root to branch, and consuming the parasites that had taken up residence there. Cautiously, carefully, figuring out how to manipulate it, to make it pliable, flexible, capable of moving through the soil of the forest floor to a better position, where it would have plenty of room to continue to grow without interfering with the growth of its neighbors.

The mental view moved out, shifted from a single oak to the forest as a whole, the slow, careful reshuffling of plants as Venom figured out how best to place them—what supported and complemented one another and what competed for resources, what could be left to its own instincts and what needed to be pruned back before it could overtake its whole section. Eddie saw, felt, the creatures that lived in him, from screaming cicadas to buzzing horseflies, from baby chipmunks to awkward fawns taking their first stumbling steps. He supported old growth and nurtured new. He took the rot of death and made something better. He healed over scars in the landscape until a human could hardly tell anything had happened at all.

"Not all just nature reclaiming its own, huh?"

In response, he felt another push of memory and watched time rewind. He saw the great, gaping furrow of the earth, the trees uprooted and overturned, the flaming bits of wreckage and shards of metal warped. He caught an earlier glimpse of them orange and glowing with residual heat, of his own blackened fingers and charred bits of bone peeking through before he was redirected again. Dirt was still freshly churned. Rocks once buried were exposed to the air. The plants that had survived the initial impact were dying. With a nudge, Venom overlaid an image of the section of forest Eddie had fallen into, the flourishing plant life, the vibrant flowers, the trees that looked like they'd been there decades instead of years. Nature was there, but it wasn't on its own. Venom had been there every moment along the way, replanting, regrowing, and sowing new.

"And this is fun for you?"

There was a feeling of—something. Like a brief pang of sorrow for potential lost before it ever had the chance to be realized pushed forcibly aside. Venom's voice, when it came, was nothing like the sound of leaves on the wind or the distant chirp of insects and birdsong. It was deep, graveled. All Venom said was, "It is peaceful."

With that single sentence, Venom withdrew, the larger forest fading from Eddie's vision in favor of the tree branch stretched before him, holding his hand. It squeezed once, the bark having gone strangely smooth, before it, too, drew away. Eddie felt empty again, but he had been left with a lot to think over.

Eddie said, "I could do with a bit of peace."

Eddie leaned back in the bed and closed his eyes, expression calm—but beneath that placid expression, his thoughts churned. Venom didn't sleep, and Eddie didn't either.

Later, much later, Eddie opened his eyes. Carefully, doing his best to sound unaccusing, he said, "You could've healed my ankle anytime you wanted."

Venom's silence was as good as the confirmation Eddie didn't actually need.

"I'm asking."

Instead of the branch, a string of goo slithered out from the trees around Eddie. It surrounded him, enclosed him far more intimately than this little stand of unnaturally grouped trees. It encapsulated him inside and out, snaked its way in and through every bone and organ and muscle fiber, bonded with him down to the very last cell. Eddie felt whole for the first time since he'd woken up.

There was the crack of his ankle realigning. In a state of mind removed from himself, Eddie observed the muscles repairing, examined the cells dividing rapidly to mend the tears. It was a time lapse again, but on a microscopic scale, and at the end of it, when his focus pulled out, Eddie had a perfectly healthy ankle.

Without a single word, Venom left Eddie aching and alone. The black substance retreated into the ground, into the trees. Eddie's breath rasped in his throat as he stared down a tree he knew didn't contain more than a small part of the presence cautiously watching him. The tree was no more Venom than Eddie was his own pinky finger, but it made it easier.

Voice surprisingly steady, Eddie asked, "How many people did you murder before me?"

"One," Venom answered softly.

Eddie didn't believe him.

Eddie got up. He had no trouble this time. His ankle easily bore his weight. His foot moved smoothly and easily. Nothing held him back as he picked up his backpack and stormed out the opening of the hut and into the forest proper, as he stumped down the gentle incline that passed for level ground at the ravine's bottom, as he strode past the bush that had received his urine and deeper into the woods—deeper into the pit.

It didn't take long to reach his landmark. Even with the overgrowth, with creeping vines crawling up the sides and moss and a black, slimey mold spread across and partially obscuring the LF1 painted wide, in the light of day it was difficult to mistake the hulking shade for anything but the shuttlecraft the Life Foundation hadn't bothered to cart off when they came to collect their dead astronauts and surviving scientific data and samples. They'd only left the one thing by accident instead of design.

"Two," the forest softly corrected.

It was what brought Eddie here. The story of the missing astronaut. There was no way he could've survived the wreck. What, did he just get up and walk away?

"Yes."

There had to be a better explanation, and all the reports of a haunting, of a friendly forest ghost that helped out travelers in distress, had given Eddie just the excuse to start his vacation here. The crash site was well-documented even if everyone, from the Life Foundation representatives to the forest service, warned people away. Eddie didn't know if he'd have any more luck than a billionaire-funded search party, but he'd felt he had to try. He'd gotten pretty close before he tripped over yet another loose root and gone tumbling down into the dark with all the force necessary to break his neck.

"Not broken."

Right. Eddie didn't break his neck. Just gave himself a fatal brain bleed when his skull collided with an evergreen. Big difference.

Properly oriented, Eddie turned. He mentally overlaid the image of another’s memory over what he was actually seeing right now. He couldn't bring himself to be surprised to find himself facing the direction he'd originally come. Ignoring the voice of the wind in his ear, Eddie retraced his steps as he followed the memory of Venom's own. When he reached the hut, he broke down laughing.

His bed was a bier and this pleasant little forest bower was originally a tomb.

The thing was, this connection went both ways, and that presence had never really left Eddie, only given him the illusion that he didn't have to stay, tried to convince him he had some sort of choice in the matter. The connection went both ways, and Eddie _reached back_. Venom didn't fight him for control as the trees straightened from their awkward, twisted slouch and shuffled back several feet. Venom allowed it as Eddie stepped forward and the individual plants that made up the bed separated and went their separate ways. Venom did nothing at all as a small oak straightened from its position crouched protectively over a pathetically small pile of faded scraps of cloth and bones long picked clean.

Eddie stood over the remains and only wished he felt nothing. "He was here all along. I'd never have found him on my own, but you brought me here my very first night."

"First," Venom agreed. Were they really still doing this? Pretending that Venom was talking to him through the sound of the forest's leaves and limited to replies the length of a short breeze?

Implacable, Eddie said, "Your first victim."

"No." Venom's voice went deep again. "The last."

"I'm supposed to believe he's the last human you killed." Eddie's voice was flat, but it felt like there was something waiting trembling underneath it, something betrayed and about to boil over.

"The last human I failed to save." The black ooze crept out from the small oak and reached out to puddle sadly against the bones. "I could not fix him. I did not know how."

Eddie thought of the broken body again, the way it didn't move so much as was moved, carried by Venom instead of carrying him. He thought of the squirrel in the hollow of the tree, the sense inside of something gone terribly wrong being set right before it was sent scurrying free. He thought of all the stories—the tales of tourists being lost only to find themselves at the forest's edge, their camper in sight; the woman who'd sworn her trip was to fulfill a dying wish and the terminal illness she'd supposedly had until the night she met a dark figure who'd brushed death's shadow away; the child who'd wandered away from her parents and claimed she played with a monster until her mother's voice called it was time for them to return home.

"And me?" Eddie asked.

"You were clumsy. You failed to watch where you were walking. You wandered off the trail and toward the drop, though I tried to ward you away."

In all fairness, Eddie was distracted trying to read the actual paper map he'd brought in the dying light, and going off-trail had been the purpose. He asked, "And the other? The one you're actually copping to?"

Venom's voice was flat. There was something unpleasant and complicated and hurting there. "He was not human."

The black substance didn't reach out for Eddie, but image after flashing image was pushed on him: a pale oozing puddle breaking free from containment, the sudden lunge of it surrounding another person, spikes pushing out, claws and sharp teeth forming and rending everything within reach.

"He was like you?"

"No." More memories came through: the spark of broken equipment, the spatter of blood across the controls, the black shield Venom had thrown over Jameson's body too late, too late. The other symbiotes huddled in their casing as fire broke out, their bodies bubbling in the heat. The other, unpossessed astronauts slumped over dead in their seats. The almost primal urge to protect and the anguish at his overwhelming failure. Looking out the window to see the Earth coming up far too fast. Voices squawking on the radio promptly drowned out by static. Riot's roar of triumph preceding impact. It was only luck he'd been weakened in the crash, only chance Venom had survived. "He was better."

He was better, and victory was bitter, Riot squirming violently the whole way down Venom's throat.

Eddie put a hand over his mouth in nauseated sympathetic sense memory. "You ate him?" Eddie, undirected this time, thought again of the broken bodies of the astronauts, the bubbling corpses of the brightly colored symbiotes trapped in their glass tubes to boil alive. "Yeah, of course you ate him. And then—you stayed here."

Riot was the leader. Venom had defied him. It was acceptable—appropriate, even—for him to sacrifice his subordinates. The reverse was unthinkable. The comet filled with Venom’s compatriots was well on its way back out of range, but even if it weren't, even if Venom had some way to reach them, they would never have accepted him back.

"In the woods. Alone."

The piece of Venom currently curled around Jameson's bones curled more tightly about them. The thought _Not alone_ conflicted with _Couldn't leave him_ was at odds with the image of all the plants, animals, and other forms of life bonding with and depending upon one another in a network under Venom's care. He was custodian of and a part of each creature all at once. It was lonely, but Venom wasn't alone—not really—and sometimes more hapless, helpless humans would stumble through and need Venom's help, too.

"Like me."

"Yes." The voice was patronizing, but warm. "Like you."

Eddie wanted to leave it there, had had enough revelations for one afternoon, but he had to know. He had suspicions, but he needed confirmation. "Venom. What happened to the squirrel?"

Venom didn't pretend to misunderstand him. The memories unfolded easily, readily. The way it had seized on the branch and fallen to the ground. The rasp to its breathing, the unsteady rise and fall of its chest. The way it twitched, but couldn't move when Venom reached out a curious tendril to examine it. The damage to its body from the fall; the damage to its brain that caused it to fall in the first place. How its organs and limbs knitted back together, whole, but the pervasive sense there was something wrong when Venom let it go. The fifteen feet it skittered away before it fell over again. The tiny skull now cradled in tree roots.

Threaded throughout every flash of memory was the fear that the same fate awaited Eddie, that no matter how much better Venom had gotten at healing damage and restoring flesh to its intended state, the instant he completely withdrew, Eddie would fall to the forest floor and Venom would have a second human body to watch over, another skull to add to his shrine to loss and failure. A twisted ankle was easy. Absorbing a tumor or eating the cells that didn't belong was straightforward. Brains? They were complicated, the center of the self that regulated the rest of the body. It was too easy for something to go wrong, for Venom to have introduced a new error when correcting the last one, for a fatal mistake to go uncorrected until it was too late. The first time Venom had fixed Eddie didn't take. If Venom had released Eddie that first night, he'd never have made it through to morning.

"Stay," Venom didn't say, but the thought—the hope, the lingering fear—remained. It wasn't just that Eddie was the first person Venom really had the chance to talk to in a very, very long time. Despite barely knowing him at all, Venom cared, both generally, as a sentient being, but also about Eddie specifically.

"I know you," Venom insisted. "I know your pain," and Eddie saw a flash of a ring being tucked in his pocket, because his shaking hands couldn't accept it back, "your loneliness," as Eddie stood on a bridge overlooking the water and wondering where he'd go next if his main reason for being in the City was gone, "your kindness," flash after flash of Eddie interacting with people, cheering them on and cheering them up, genuinely interested in their triumphs and struggles both, "your highs and lows. I have seen you broken and crumbling under the weight of your failures and I have seen you standing tall and unbowed." Firmly, "I know you, Eddie Brock." Quietly, "But I cannot make you stay. I will not."

Eddie crouched in front of the puddle of black curled around the pile of bones. He reached out a hand, though Venom was already within him and there was literally no way for them to be closer. That piece of Venom reached back for him, threaded itself around his fingers like they were holding hands, like Venom was desperately trying to hold on.

The worst part was, Eddie felt like he knew Venom, too. It had been hardly any time at all. Eddie had been unconscious most of it. Venom was an alien creature with thoughts and feelings beyond human comprehension. Their points of commonality were vastly outnumbered by their differences. But there was that feeling of rightness, of being whole, with Venom seated fully within Eddie's body, his thoughts positioned side by side with Eddie's conscious mind. Venom would have happily and without regret kept Eddie ignorant of what happened if he could have, but he'd also come clean. Venom was lonely and well-meaning and wanted to keep Eddie with a sincerity and fervency Eddie doubted anyone else in his life could match.

Eddie smiled, but it was wobbly and asymmetrical. "I'm sorry, Venom," and Eddie was, he really was, "but you've gotta let me go."

Venom didn't want to. (Eddie didn't want him to.) Through their connection, more than anything else, Eddie could feel the comfort and joy Venom had taken in Eddie's company, in not being alone. It felt like a goodbye. It was probably kinder than Eddie's dread. He winced in anticipation.

The separation came all at once. Black flowed from his fingertips to join that which was touching him. Where before he'd felt full, whole, he suddenly felt bereft and empty inside. He ached with it. He couldn't help a sound like a sob as even that last touch against his fingers withdrew. Venom curled back up with Jameson's bones as if to comfort himself. Eddie couldn't tell, no longer knew what Venom felt. His motives were as opaque as they could get when scrutinized by someone who had been privileged to once see the very shape of his thoughts.

"Venom?" No voice answered him. No convenient breeze blew, and nothing talked through the leaves. Even the black puddle had faded into the shadows. "Thank you."

Eddie straightened up. His ankle didn't so much as twinge. He turned to face the incline. It was steep, but Eddie wasn't worried about falling again. The forest was friendly, and Eddie had faith Venom would catch him. Steeling himself, Eddie climbed up and out of the ravine.

—

Eddie had the map, though it was unnecessary. He had a much more thorough knowledge of the forest now than he'd managed to achieve through the research he'd done before he'd started this. Though Venom had withdrawn, was as gone as he could be when he inhabited every inch of Eddie's surroundings, Eddie knew these woods, knew those trees, knew the placement of every branch and root and every small plant that grew up between. He made it to the forest's edge without a single wrong turn.

He turned on his phone, mostly dead, but still hanging on. It got service here, standing at the side of a road where Venom's domain ended. Eddie had three bars and fifty-seven missed calls.

Eddie called the first one back, the most important of them, the only other person who had a say in where and whether Eddie decided to drop off the map. His boss answered with, "Where the hell have you been?"

It had only been a few days; it had been several weeks. Eddie had been gone long enough to be declared missing. "I, uh." Eddie looked back at the forest. The sun was setting. The shadows were dark and deep. The forest's mouth was inviting even as it was foreboding, tempting in the worst way. "I got lost a while."

There was an assessing silence. "Did you at least get a story out of it?"

Eddie laughed. He would be the first to admit it sounded a bit unhinged. "Not a one."

His boss didn't ask if Eddie was okay. Instead, he said, "Do you need me to call emergency services for you?"

"I'm all right."

His boss didn't directly call him out on the lie—but he did call park services and an ambulance. Eddie sat shivering at the side of road, waiting for them and trying not to read too much into the movement of the trees. The wind was picking up, that was all.

The branches shifted like they were waving goodbye.

—

Though Eddie had no obvious injuries, between admitting he'd hit his head falling down that first day and his inability to tell the date without first consulting his phone (now dead), he was admitted to the hospital for a CAT scan.

"You're in astonishingly good health for someone who was lost in the woods for most of a month," his attending said. Eddie honestly couldn't tell if that was suspicion or apathy marking her face. He honestly didn't care.

He wanted to go home. (He wanted to go back.) His rent had come automatically out of his checking account, so everything was mostly how he left it. He had an apartment to return to, at least. The investigation into his disappearance was closed. His boss was torn between being mad at Eddie for getting lost in the woods and at himself for convincing Eddie to take the vacation. A few people mentioned being glad to see Eddie back out and about—co-workers, a security guard, the woman who owned and ran his local convenience store—but mostly Eddie slipped back into city life as easily and unremarkably as he'd disappeared. He didn't so much have friends as friendly acquaintances. As many as there were, they didn't fill the void.

Eddie lasted three months.

—

Here's the thing: Eddie was a city boy, born and bred. He'd been born in one, gone to university in the heart of one, and spent his entire adult life working in them. That he'd eventually ended up back in the city where he'd been born was a coincidence, but it didn't change the fact that cities were where he'd always felt he'd belonged, where he'd felt most comfortable. Even at his lowest, his loneliest, he was at his best surrounded on all sides by other people. It was a universal truth that Eddie Brock didn't do well alone.

So it made no sense that he'd quit his job, sell his possessions, and buy the first bus ticket to the middle of nowhere where he'd been trapped for nearly a full month. It made no sense, none at all, that he'd give it all up for someone he'd known for what, to him, had only been a few days. It made absolutely zero sense that he'd heft his backpack, phone and map long since left behind, to trek straight into the heart of the woods that had practically held him hostage.

It made no sense, but Eddie had never claimed to be a sensible guy.

(Eddie may not have stayed, but that didn't mean he couldn't return.)

—

Eddie had barely passed the boundary between regular woods and the forest that made up and belonged to Venom before everything came alive. Instead of roots tripping him and shrubs blocking his way, the forest floor leveled out. A path opened up before him and closed behind him, though he knew, he _knew_ , that it would open back up if he wished to go back out the same way. When he reached the ravine, the sides were covered in a thicket with thick branches like fencing. There was a gap leading to packed dirt steps held in place by an elaborate root system. To either side were strangely shaped trees with branches reaching out like handrails. Eddie paused at the head of the stairs.

He put his left hand on one of the handrails. The bark was unnaturally smooth under his palm. Eddie shook his head, smiling. "I don't need to go down there. What I want is right here." He rubbed his thumb against the whorl of the wood. "I promise, I'm not going anywhere this time."

Slowly, almost hesitantly, black beaded up from the branch and slid over Eddie's fingers when he failed to pull away. It moved up his arm. It engulfed half his chest. Nothing had absorbed, no connection had been made. Venom was giving Eddie every chance to get scared, to run away.

Eddie scooped up a handful of the black substance with his right hand and brought it directly up to his face. "Come on, Venom. Let me stay."

It surged directly at his mouth. It was like kissing; it was like being consumed. Eddie was an empty cup, and Venom filled him to the brim.

Eddie thought, _I could love you._

Venom thought, _I do, I do, I do._

—

There was a forest out there whose biggest claim to fame was that time a Life Foundation rocket crashed in it. The Life Foundation collected their samples and their scientists' and astronauts' bodies—all but one. Perhaps that was where the stories started.

They claimed the forest was haunted. A child described a figure who was willing to play patty-cakes with her for a full thirty minutes straight when she'd gotten bored and tried to wander away from her mother. A man raved about being possessed by an oppressively friendly ghost who'd walked him straight back to camp instead of letting him exercise his God-given right to get drunk and try to fist fight a bear. A woman with a hard deadline on her bucket list came back out with a sudden and open-ended extension after meeting someone who had faced her death straight on and turned it aside. A journalist went missing for most of a month, only to be found in perfect health—and went missing again just months later, last known location that very same forest.

They claimed the forest was haunted.

They were right.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: canonical character deaths (all of the astronauts and all of the movie symbiotes except Venom), references to canon-typical violence, Eddie sort of dies at the beginning of the fic (but gets better between scene breaks), some disturbing and controlling behavior on Venom's part (restraining Eddie, keeping back information like how much time has passed, deliberately leaving his ankle partially injured to control his movements, (accidentally, but still) injuring him when he tried to get free, etc). 
> 
> If anyone is interested in the Discord server that spawned this, here's a 24 hour invite: https://discord.gg/Fnjxes


End file.
